What’s So Great About “The Great Gatsby”?

What’s So Great About The Great Gatsby?

Description

Featuring The Great Gatsby scholars Maureen Corrigan and Anne Margaret Daniel, and moderated by Alfred Bendixen, founder of the American Literature Association, the panel will consider the novel on the 100th anniversary of its publication, its history, and its author, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Registration is required for this free event. Those who register will be admitted first. Remaining seats will be filled at 4:25 p.m. on a first- come, first-served basis.

Alfred Bendixen, Moderator

Alfred Bendixen is best known as the founder of the American Literature Association, for which he continues to serve as Executive Director. Much of his scholarship has been devoted to the recovery of 19th-century texts, particularly by women writers, and to the exploration of neglected genres, including the ghost story, detective fiction, science fiction, and travel writing.

His most recent work explores the role of genre in the formation of a democratic literary cultures and includes “A Companion to the American Novel” (Wiley-Blackwell 2012), “The Cambridge History of American Poetry,” co-edited with Stephen Burt (Cambridge University Press 2015), “The Centrality of Crime Fiction in American Literary Culture,” co-edited with Olivia Carr Edenfield (Routledge 2017), “A Companion to the American Short Story,” co-edited with James Nagel (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), and the Library of America edition of the “Novels, Stories, and Poems of Charlotte Perkins Gilman” (2022).

He currently teaches for the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University.

Maureen Corrigan

Maureen Corrigan is The Nicky and Jamie Grant Distinguished Professor of the Practice in Literary Criticism in the Department of English at Georgetown University. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania with a concentration in the social criticism o fJohn Ruskin and William Morris. She received her B.A. in English from Fordham University. For the past 35 years, Corrigan has been the weekly book critic on the Peabody Award-winning NPR program, ''Fresh Air.''

She has received the 2023 John Seigenthaler "Legends Award," the 2023 Kukula Award for Excellence in Non-Fiction Reviewing from Washington Monthly Magazine, The National Book Critics Circle 2018 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and The 1999 Edgar Award in Criticism.

Her book, So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures was selected as an Editors' Choice by The New York Times Book Review.. Her literary memoir, Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading (Random House) was published in 2005.

Anne Margaret Daniel

Anne Margaret Daniel teaches literature and humanities at the New School University in New York City. She has written on topics from Oscar Wilde's trials to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and contemporary music. Her edition of Fitzgerald's previously unpublished short stories I'd Die for You and Other Lost Stories was published by Scribner in 2017; her Norton Library edition of The Great Gatsby in 2022; and her second edition of Tales of the Jazz Age for Oxford / World's Classics in 2023.

She is currently at work, with Jackson L. Bryer, on an edition of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald's selected letters; and on a book of essays about Bob Dylan.

This event is presented in collaboration with PUL's celebration of , a suite of on- and off-campus programming inspired by the library’s significant Fitzgerald and Gatsby-related holdings.

Host or Publisher Co-presented by Labyrinth Books and the Princeton Public Library